1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic systems, and more particularly to master-slave data management systems and methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic devices manufactured for capturing, creating, storing, manipulating or transferring digital music, sound, images, movies or other encoded data are more prevalent with the advent of inexpensive semiconductor processing and increased consumer demand. Products such as portable MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group Layer 3 Standard) players, digital cameras and digital voice recorders continue to gain popularity. The general trend for each of these commercial devices is to provide for greater data storage capability at reduced cost.
Unfortunately, the trend for providing greater memory in these devices is accompanied with the trend in increased cost and time wasted when such large amount of data is lost from a memory device failure. Many portable electronic devices lack redundancy in design; such lack fails to help the consumer recover from a memory device failure. Even for devices that have the ability to provide back-up data, time spent restoring previously backed-up data is tedious and troublesome for the average consumer. Also, should a purchaser desire to upgrade a memory device in their product, a time-consuming process ensues with the purchaser often using a PC to back up data for restoration onto the replacement memory device.
Some manufacturers have attempted to solve these problems through increased data throughput to PCs for backup and file transfer. Unfortunately, the single memories in these devices often fail prior to back-up due to physical shock such as dropping, or normal wear and tear. Another solution utilizes two banks of DIMMS (dual in-line memory modules). In this solution, data is written to a first bank at the same time a second bank is reading data for the next write. If one bank fails, the data is written from the bank that mirrors the data to replace the failed memory. Another approach includes a RAID (redundant array of industry-standard DIMMS) memory solution using five memory controllers to control five memory banks of industry-standard DIMMS. The memory controllers split the data into four blocks and write the four blocks to the four memory banks. A RAID processor calculates parity information which is stored on the fifth memory bank. If any one of the memory banks requires replacement, the data can be recovered from the remaining four memory banks. Each of these solutions provides for data redundancy, but the solutions do not provide mechanisms for consumer-friendly memory repair and upgrade in portable devices.